Dot Com Zambia has published its audited results for the year ended 31 December 2025, delivering profit after tax of ZMW 6.75 million which is a 94% increase on the ZMW 3.48 million recorded in 2024. Revenue grew 26% to ZMW 665.6 million and the company closed the year debt-free with a cash balance of ZMW 17.9 million, up from ZMW 2.7 million at the start of the year.

For a company that only completed its initial public offering on the Lusaka Securities Exchange Alternative Market in December 2025, the results announce a business that arrived on the public stage in considerably better financial health than when it entered. 

Its story is one of deliberate reinvention. Founded in 2009 by Mawano Kambeu as one of Zambia's earliest e-commerce platforms, the company initially bridged the gap between Zambian consumers and the global marketplace at a time when internet penetration was thin and digital commerce was largely theoretical in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. By 2015, the company had restructured under the BookNow Zambia Limited vehicle, attracting Kukula Capital and eVentures Africa as strategic investors, and began pivoting toward technology infrastructure.

In 2018, the e-commerce arm was divested through a management buyout, and the company committed entirely to digital payment platforms. That same year, it launched Zambia's first prepaid automated toll payment platform, the eToll system, and began building what is today the dominant private-sector digital payments infrastructure in the country. The eToll Road System now operates across all 31 inland toll plazas in Zambia, managing electronic toll collection through RFID and smart card technology for more than 45,000 vehicles.

The eLevy platform enables local councils to collect fees digitally from market vendors and bus operators, bringing transparency to municipal revenue collection across a projected base of over 800,000 users nationwide. The eFuel platform serves over 300 corporate clients with B2B fleet fuel management and business intelligence. The ePass mobile application integrates tolling, fuel, and payments for retail users. This ecosystem which was built over seven years of patient infrastructure development, generated the ZMW 665.6 million in revenue that the 2025 accounts reflect.

The income statement reveals a business operating in a high-volume, thin-margin payment processing model, the structural character of payments infrastructure everywhere. Cost of sales of ZMW 641.4 million against revenue of ZMW 665.6 million produced a gross profit of ZMW 24.1 million, representing a gross margin of approximately 3.6%. Operating profit of ZMW 9.6 million and profit before tax of ZMW 9.2 million, with a tax charge of ZMW 2.49 million, delivered the ZMW 6.75 million PAT.

These margins are narrow by conventional standards, but they reflect the economic reality of a transaction-processing business where the value proposition is scale, reliability, and market position rather than unit economics. The 94% PAT growth on a 26% revenue increase signals meaningful operating leverage, with fixed cost absorption improving as transaction volumes scale. Total assets grew to ZMW 29.0 million from ZMW 19.4 million, and equity and reserves expanded from ZMW 8.1 million to ZMW 21.2 million with the latter boosted by ZMW 11.1 million in net IPO proceeds.

The company's cash position of ZMW 17.9 million, delivered without any debt, gives it a clean starting position for the growth investments the IPO was designed to fund. The IPO raised ZMW 12.3 million at ZMW 12.30 per share for 10% of equity, with proceeds earmarked for product development and R&D (50%), office infrastructure and working capital (24%), technology systems (13%), and marketing (13%).

The Dot Com Zambia listing in December 2025 carried significance well beyond the size of the transaction. It was the first listing on the LuSE since 2020, ending a five-year drought in new listings on a bourse that has long needed fresh companies to broaden its sectoral depth beyond mining, beverages, and financials. More materially, it was the first pure-technology company ever to list on the Lusaka Securities Exchange, and the inaugural listing on the LuSE Alternative Market since that segment was launched in 2015 specifically to attract high-growth SMEs.

The LuSE CEO described the listing as "bold and exciting," and the Technology and Science Minister attended the pre-IPO event, signalling government recognition of the listing as a proof point for Zambia's digital economy ambitions. A homegrown technology company that started as a one-product startup has demonstrated that Zambian tech businesses can achieve sufficient scale, governance quality, and investor readiness to access public markets. The ESOP component, reserving 99,999 shares for employees, embeds staff ownership in a sector where talent retention is a structural challenge.

The Zambian context for Dot Com Zambia's growth is compelling. The government's drive to digitise revenue collection at every level of the public sector, road tolls, municipal levies, utility payments, fuel management, is the policy tailwind that has driven the company's revenue from ZMW 214 million in 2023 to ZMW 529 million in 2024 to ZMW 666 million in 2025. The ZMW 59 billion fuel payments market, which DCZ identified in its prospectus as a primary expansion target for the eFuel platform, remains largely un-digitised.4

Zambia's demographics also amplify this opportunity. A young, urbanising population with rapidly growing smartphone penetration, combined with the government's stated commitment to digital public services, creates a demand environment for payment infrastructure that has several years of structural runway. The copper-driven economic growth underpinning Zambia's development ambitions will bring more businesses, more vehicle fleets, and more commercial activity through the toll and payment networks DCZ operates. Bus and event ticketing, loyalty programmes, and smart card technology in development represent adjacent opportunities that leverage existing platform infrastructure at limited incremental capital cost.

The critique of the current position is that the company's dependence on public sector contracts, principally the NRFA partnership anchoring the eToll system, concentrates counterparty risk in a single government agency. Diversification into private sector corporate clients through eFuel, and into retail users through ePass, reduces this risk over time, but the pace of that diversification will determine how exposed the business remains to public sector payment cycles and policy decisions. Equally, a gross margin of 3.6% leaves limited room for cost overruns, and the ability to retain processing fee structures as volumes scale will be a pricing discipline test that management will face as the platform grows.

Dot Com Zambia enters 2026 as a profitable, listed, debt-free business with a growing product portfolio, a captive corporate client base of over 300 organisations, and a market position in electronic tolling that carries genuine barriers to entry. The work of converting that infrastructure position into expanded margins and product diversification is the next chapter. The first results as a public company suggest the foundation is solid.